THE bizarre Christian ritual of immersive baptism at least has some relevance when performed in sunlight rather than inside establishment vanity-driven edifices such as cathedrals, built so that the plebs were kept under the yoke by the minority ruling elite through religious diktat and superstition.

This formerly pagan behaviour had its basis of fact in worship of the sun as the giver of life and unwittingly the relationship of cyanobacteria and water to evolved complex organisms through the production of molecular oxygen as a waste product of photosynthesis into the earth’s atmosphere.

The fertility rites of Easter are unavoidably centred around the vernal equinox, dramatised in the myth of the sun god and rebirth of the light at the winter solstice nine months later.

Aesthetically and practically speaking the pagans had an affinity with nature lost on many today and from their point of view and in my opinion a natural cathedral such as a glade of aspen trees with leaves singing in the breeze would be far preferable to colossal blocks of cold stone blotting out the sun.

Tom Scaife, Manor Drive, York.